Her Letters To Lovecraft: Mary Faye Durr

Mary Faye Durr was born on 17 May 1893, the youngest of three children born to Abraham and Mary Durr. Like many women of the period, details of her early life are sketchy. Is it known that she graduated high school and then college, graduating from the University of Ohio in 1915.

In the same year, the young woman first pops up in the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, showing that she had at some point joined the ranks of amateur journalism, and in particular the United Amateur Press Association:

“A Best Book”, by Mary Faye Durr is a brief but delightful essay which reveals a just appreciation of the broader functions of literature.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Dec 1915, Collected Essays 1.87

Durr continues to appear sporadically in Lovecraft’s reviews of amateur journals, and much of what he says is relatively positive, speaking to her technical skill and taste, if not exactly praising Durr’s creativity, and tracing her taking on positions within the UAPA:

“At the End of the Road”, by Mary Faye Durr, is graphic and touching description of a deserted schoolhouse. The atmosphere of pensive reminiscence is well sustained by the judiciously selected variety of images and allusions. […][120] “The Melody and Colour of ‘The Lady of Shalott'”, by Mary Faye Durr, is a striking Tennysonian critique, whose psychological features, involving a comparison of chromatic and poetic elements, are ingenious and unusual. Miss Durr i[s] obviously no careless student of poesy, for the minute analyses of various passages give evidence of thorough assimilation and intelligent comprehension.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Jun 1916, Collected Essays 1.119, 120

“Beyond the Law”, by Mary Faye Durr, is a light short story of excellent idea and construction, whose only censurable point is the use of “simplified” spelling.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur May 1917, Collected Essays 1.153

Miss Mary Faye Durr of Mount Sterling, Ohio, has accepted appointment as Secretary, her occupancy of that important office ensuring an efficient and business-like handling of the records.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Sep 1917, Collected Essays 1.172

“The Village”, a delightful study by our Secretary, Miss Durr, is replete with vividness of atmosphere and delicacy of touch; though it is closely rivalled by the masterly bit of psychology from the hand of the editor, entitled “An Interpretation”.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Jan 1918, Collected Essays 1.183

Mary Faye Durr first appears in Lovecraft’s private letters in 1918, and it seems as if they were about to come into correspondence—through a typically Lovecraftian 22-page letter—if they had not already come into contact:

Ye Gods! For ‘Eaving’s sake abstain from sending my “mission in life” letter to Mistress Durr. I recall saying in it that I thought she was minding other people’s business! I have given her a 22-page broadside, calculated to demolish any pragmatical notions which may still becloud her mentality, but have not gone into personal excuses for idleness beyond saying that my constitution does not permit of systematic endeavour, else (of course) I should be doing something the same as any other rational human being. What does she think I am—a corner loafer? She might know better—for if I were, the “work or fight” law would have “got” me long ago, and I should be toiling in some munition factory or shovelling sewers at some content. I am not particularly anxious to discuss my affairs with relative strangers—my letter was for you, not her.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 21 Aug 1918, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 202

Lovecraft says nothing of Durr’s personal life, and probably knew as little to nothing about her activities beyond amateurdom as she did about his. While Lovecraft was unemployed at this period, it appears that after graduating from university Mary Faye Durr became a schoolteacher; yearbooks and newspaper records track a long career in public education in Ohio that would last for decades. During the earliest part of her career (according to the Federal 1920 and 1930 census) she was apparently still living at home with her parents, a not-unusual situation for an unmarried young woman.

No letters survive from Lovecraft to Durr or Durr to Lovecraft, so the shape and extent of their correspondence is difficult to evaluate, but apparently Lovecraft lent one of her letters to James F. Morton:

I am glad Father Mo found Miss D’s epistle so interesting. She has a sort of pert, laconic humour or smartness, of which she is evidently fairly proud, & which she is not at all reluctant to employ.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 29 Aug 1918, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 208

Speaking of clients—you & Miss Durr will be satisfied at last. I am a real labouring man! In other words, I have undertaken to make a thorough & exhaustive revision of Rev. D. V. Bush’s long prose book—now called “Pike’s Peak or Bust”, though part of my job is to find another name.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 14 Nov 1918, Letters to Alfred Galpin & Others 222

Given Lovecraft’s correspondence with others, the start of their letter-exchange was probably fairly formal, slow to build a rapport.

Mary Faye Durr was secretary of the UAPA 1917-1918, elected treasurer for 1918-1919, and at the 1919 convention, was elected President of the United Amateur Press Association for the 1919-1920 term, only the third woman in that office. The popular history of amateur journalism marks this period as sort of the beginning of the end of the UAPA:

The poet Rheinhart Kleiner, of Brooklyn, N. Y., was chosen President in 1918, and another woman President in 1919, Miss Mary Faye Durr, of Marietta, Ohio. But its members began to relax, recruiting was not carried on, interest waned, and this branch of the United, though seeming to have the best claim to lineal descent from the original body, gradually ceased to function, and in 1926 it passed out of existence.
—Truman J. Spencer, The History of Amateur Journalism 92 (online edition)

The truth is a little more complicated. Early in the year, Durr apparently realized that the UAPA desperately needed new members and set up an amateur journal specifically to do so, The Recruiter. Lovecraft reviewed it with high praise:

The Recruiter for January marks the advent to amateurdom of a new paper, which easily takes its place among the very best of recent editorial enterprises. Edited by Misses Mary Faye Durr and L. Evelyn Schump in the interest of the United recruits whom they are securing, its thoroughly meritorious quality speaks well for the new members thus added to our circle. […]

“Winter”, a brief poem by Hettie Murdock, celebrates in a pleasant way an unpleasant season. The lines are notable for correctness, spontaneity, and vitality, though not in the least ambitious in scope. […]

“Shades of Adam”, by Mary Faye Durr, is an interesting and humorously written account of the social side of our 1918 convention. Miss Durr is exceptionally gifted in the field of apt, quiet, and laconic wit, and in this informal chronicle neglects no opportunity for dryly amusing comment on persons and events. […]

The Recruiter’s is brief and business-like, introducing the magazine as a whole, and its contributors individually, Amateurdom is deeply indebted to the publishers of this delightful newcomer, and it is to be hoped that they may continue their efforts; both toward seeking recruits as high in quality as those here represented, and toward issuing their admirable journal as frequently as is feasible.

—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur Mar 1919, Collected Essays 1.224

Hettie Murdock was a fellow schoolteacher in Ohio; she and Durr would share a close friendship, to be detailed later, but Murdock’s involvement here may suggest that Durr recruited her for the UAPA around this time.

While no letters from Durr to Lovecraft (or vice versa) survive, one letter survives from Durr to Anne Tillery Renshaw among Lovecraft’s papers; Renshaw was at the time Official Editor for the UAPA under Durr. While the letter is only dated “Thursday, P.M.” it appears to have been during Durr’s period as president, and mentions that Halloween is the next day—and October 31st fell on a Friday in 1919. The letter deals in part with Durr’s correspondence with Lovecraft, and recruiting:

I supposed Recruiting committees were announced in Sept. no., but Lovecraft says not. If the two vice presidents have not notified their committees I will see what I can do about it.

I don’t remember if I told you about application blanks in my last, but this is the situation. Eddie told me in August that he was having Lovecraft look after them, and only last week I discovered that none had ever been ordered. Cook is getting them out now as fast as possible.
—Mary Faye Durr to Anne Tillery Renshaw, Thursday [30 Oct 1919], Brown Digital Repository

Renshaw presumably forwarded this letter to Lovecraft, who later used it to compose some Christmas greetings (let us all be thankful for parsimonious packrats!)

With this letter and The Recruiter, it is clear that Durr was conscious of difficulties in recruiting…but she was still a working woman, with limited time to devote to amateur affairs. It also shows she must have been in semi-regular contact with Lovecraft for various duties related to amateurdom, such as the hunt for a laureate judge which netted Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft for his point appeared to point potential recruits at Durr:

Your failure to hear from the association officially is due to the negligence of the new Secretary, a rather eccentric elderly woman who was given the post merely because she happens to live in the next convention city. You might speak about it to the President—Miss Mary F. Durr, 526 Third St., Marietta, Ohio.
—H. P. Lovecraft to James Larkin Pearson, 19 Sep 1919, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner & Others 320

The secretary was Ida C. Houghton, who would herself be president of the UAPA during the 1921-1922 term, where she would butt heads with Lovecraft, who had taken on the position of Official Editor. At the 1920 convention where she handed off the office of president to Alfred Galpin, Durr gave a memorable speech riffing on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (Fossil 341); her friend Hettie Murdock also attended the convention.

The last mention of Mary Faye Durr by Lovecraft is a brief review in 1921:

Miss Durr’s “As Ye Judge” is marked by distinguishable sanity and good sense—the ideal liberalism of a thoughtful mind—and lacks only originality of presentation to be remarkable. Not that it is in any sense unoriginal, but that it states in unornamented way truths which are universal among progressive students today.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Vivisector,” The Wolverine #10 (June 1921), Collected Essays 1.288

Without access to more amateur journals of the period, it is impossible to trace Mary Faye Durr’s career in that field much further; she never again seems to have sought or held office in the UAPA, and may have dropped out of amateurdom altogether after a time; at the very least, that would seem to be the end of any regular communication with Lovecraft, as there are no further mentions of her in his letters after this date.

A little bit more information is available about Mary Faye Durr’s personal life—and this is where Hettie Murdock comes back into the picture.

Mary Faye Durr’s parents both died in 1936; in the 1940 Federal census, she is listed as living with Hettie Barton Murdock as a boarder. In the 1950 Federal census, Durr and Murdock are both living together, and one transcriber has Murdock listed as “wife”—although a look at the actual record establishes this was probably an error that was scratched out.

Newspaper accounts offer additional details. Both Durr and Murdock were single, never married, working as teachers at West High in Akron, Ohio, and may have both been members of the Unitarian Universalist Church. In 1943, they appear to have shared a vacation cottage in Cape Cod.

What happened to the Cape Cod cottage isn’t clear, but in 1956-1957, Mary and Hettie built a small home in Stuart, Florida in 1956 (St. Lucie News Tribune, 3 Oct 1956; The Palm Beach Post, 9 Feb 1957). The articles state that Murdock and Durr were “retired schoolteachers,” but Durr’s obituary claims she didn’t retire from teaching in Akron until 1965, so possibly only one of them was retired, or they were semi-retired but still teaching in some capacity. Murdock was still active in the Akron social scene as part of the Quota Club through the 1950s, with Durr sometimes involved as well, according to newspaper accounts, and it seems likely that the pair were snowbirds (cf. The Stuart News, 28 Nov 1957). Hettie B. Murdock would pass away in Florida on 28 Dece 1965 (The Stuart News, 30 Dec 1965).

Were they just housemates? Was this a Boston marriage? That they must have been great friends is undoubted; the women cohabited for at least 16 years, not just in Ohio but in Massachusetts and Florida as well, and were active in each other’s hobby-groups to some extent. But was there more? Were they actually lesbians?

The framing every same-sex relationship as necessarily heterosexual, chaste, and platonic is a form of queer erasure; a popular internet trope where archaeologists and historians look at any same-sex couple and declare they were roommates or were otherwise not evidence of homosexual relationships. Reality is a lot messier. We have only impersonal data to go by. We have no intimate documentation on Mary and Hettie’s relationship—no letters, diaries, poems, or stories that might give hints of lesbianism. We know Elsa Gidlow was a lesbian because she declared it, but such open announcements were rare.

What we do have is context. Mary and Hettie were public school teachers; one of the few occupations readily available to educated women. The job came with a degree of public scrutiny and high expectations for standards of behavior. Married women were often forced out of the workforce, so it wasn’t unusual for women teachers to remain single, and any sexual scandal or impropriety would also have seen their dismissal. Novalyne Price Ellis recalled the strictly regimented lifestyle expected of single women teachers when she was hired at Cross Plains, Texas in 1934 in One Who Walked Alone (1986), and while Akron isn’t small-town Texas, some of the same expectations were probably in place.

In the economic atmosphere of the early-to-mid 20th century, two women who shared the economic burden of a household together wouldn’t be too unusual. A pair of spinster teachers who lived together would be relatively inconspicuous, whether they were in a closeted romantic relationship or simply platonic life-partners. While a rare few LGBTQ+ folks were open about their sexuality, they were outliers; the majority of such people could not afford the social or legal discrimination that came from being “out.” Even if Mary and Hettie were in love, and shared their life together, they could not openly acknowledge such love without serious ramifications.

All of this speculation is far and away from Mary Faye Durr’s correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft—but that is in itself kind of the point. Neither Lovecraft or Durr revealed all of themselves to each other in their letters, based on what scanty evidence we have of their correspondence, and neither would be expected to. Amateur journalism was the crux and driving point of their relationship, but their lives outside that were closed books. We always have to remember that there is more to Mary Faye Durr than just the words on the page, more to the lives of Lovecraft and his correspondents than what is just in their letters to each other.

More than we will ever know.

Unusually for one of Lovecraft’s correspondents, because Mary Faye Durr was in so many school yearbooks, as a student or a teacher, we have many more photos of her publicly available than others, so here’s a little gallery showing her over the years. There are probably many more in yearbooks yet unscanned.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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